Help! Education drowning

Anil Seth

While our universities may survive, I have doubts whether education will survive. Increasingly, universities are organisations which award degrees. Education is an incidental activity.

Any change has to be triggered by an external agency and no one is better placed than the IT industry because its growth is intricately linked to the performance of universities as institutions of learning.

We will consider software engineering and related courses only and the first problem we encounter is the severe shortage of faculty. There is little or no hope of the situation improving in the near future. Yet, we need more people equipped with newer and better skills.

Engineering is a practitioner’s art. Fortunately, computers have become very inexpensive and open source software is available for virtually every domain. For the next decade, we need to see if our universities can have courses with less emphasis on classroom lectures and more on self learning. A faculty member can become a guide who may at times even learn along with the students. The courses can be supplemented by lectures by industry professionals, who may not mind teaching for three hours once a month.

A couple of years ago, I would also have wondered what prevents people within the universities from implementing such a system. Any change stops dead at who will set the question paper and how will it be set? This will require the syllabus to be well defined, otherwise how can external examiners set the paper and how can students be expected to study for the exam. Suppose one finds a solution to the syllabus issue. Now, one cannot change the course contents or syllabus for several years because the universities are already overloaded with conducting exams for various courses. If the course contents are changed, the university will have to conduct two exams – one for each version of the course, to cater to the needs of the students who need multiple attempts to clear a paper.

Such an environment is notoriously hostile to creativity. Any new approach is bound to have risks. If the system will not allow one to discard an unwanted step, how can a person take any risks? Our question papers are full of safe questions which expect a student to reproduce parts of the textbooks. Even the programming problems are safe. I have observed that many students memorise programs that they know are likely feature in question papers.

We, as a society, have developed a very peculiar notion of ‘merit’. We in our wisdom introduced the concept of ‘free’ seats in private colleges for meritorious students. It should have been pretty obvious that we will discover that the privileged class students are subsidised by the less fortunate sections of the society. Our concept of merit is a single-valued function. Since we do not know how to handle the implications of socio-economic background, we ignore them. We observe the growth of tuition classes which are more prosperous than the academic institutions, yet take no steps to address the causes which have created and caused them to flourish.

The concept of a uniform merit list after a BE in Computer Engineering is utterly meaningless. No company hires on the basis of this list.Hence, the heavens are not going to fall if each college gives grades as per the performance of its own students with little regard for what other colleges are doing. The colleges would then be under pressure to improve the effectiveness of their academics because the employers will seek out the good colleges.

Good companies may be able to expedite change with very little effort. I would not be surprised if some of the major companies just promise on-campus recruitment to universities which change and adopt new patterns of education and publicise this fact, it may trigger an avalanche for change.

Seth is a physicist by training and computer engineer by profession. He may be contacted at anilseth@sancharnet.in